mdlbear | River: Unreality Warp (Reply)

So last Saturday (yesterday when I started writing this, but I don't know how long it will take me to finish -- I have a huge backlog of unfinished drafts) I ran across an article on the Scientific American website with the intriguing title " When Things Feel Unreal, Is That a Delusion or an Insight?" I might have dismissed it as clickbait except that it's describing (a more severe form of) something that actually happens to me pretty often. It's called depersonalization-derealization disorder. Along with the article, you should watch the documentary it refers to: "Depersonalized; Derealized; Deconstructed.". (It's a playlist; the first video is an overview, edited from the six interviews that follow it.)

I found it particularly fitting that last Saturday was Autistic Pride Day. They're related.

I first encountered the terms depersonalization and derealization in 2009. Both are forms of dissociation -- derealization is the feeling that the external world is unreal somehow; depersonalization is the feeling that you aren't real. My case is nowhere near the level of unreality that would qualify as a "disorder". It's a coping mechanism.

I started thinking about derealization when I started on antidepressants. It felt like there had been a kind of scrim between me and the world, and it was gone. Colors were more vibrant. I noticed it again each time I changed antidepressants, so it must have come back so gradually that I didn't notice.

I experience depersonalization most acutely when I have what I've been calling an "anxiety attack" -- full-body shaking, mostly. It isn't a panic attack, and not necessarily anxiety either. The first time it happened I had just found out that I had not missed a tax deadline. Adrenaline withdrawal? Emotion attack? Go figure. But there my body was, shaking all over, and there I, was observing this interesting phenomenon and trying to work out whether it was a panic attack.

But that's the thing -- I wasn't panicking, I was detached. And interested. The second or third time it happened, I (eventually) thought of taking a couple of deep breaths, which put a stop to it. So... yeah. As one of the people in the video said, it isn't a disorder, it's a gift.

Today's music (or spoken word something-or-other, anyway -- it won a Pegasus, so it's filk by definition) is Clif Flynt's amazing (astounding) "Unreality Warp". There doesn't seem to be a performance online; if you know of one, please link it in the comments.